


Snow or: Late Night Conversation

by LucyInTheSkye



Series: Sirius x Remus [28]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Declarations Of Love, Explicit Sexual Content, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Insecurity, M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Smoking, Sort Of, Trauma, description of injury, disturbing imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:09:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22469182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyInTheSkye/pseuds/LucyInTheSkye
Summary: January 1980. It was not a happy childhood.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: Sirius x Remus [28]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1483745
Comments: 6
Kudos: 48





	Snow or: Late Night Conversation

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags. More backstory/plot than smut.

Remus woke up mid-inhale. The breaths that followed were sharp, almost like there was panic mounting in his bones. His stomach began to cramp with nerves, but he managed to sit up, the blankets tucking him in sliding down to his waist. 

He was alone.

It took him a good few seconds until he was absolutely certain that he wasn’t supposed to be alone. The past seven months had not been a dream, and this wasn’t the brutal wake-up from it. He shared this bed, he finally had someone to share his bed with. He gulped down anxious mouthfuls of air. He had someone who had laid beside him on every morning when he woke up for the past seven months. 

It couldn’t all have been a dream, could it?

Remus reined in as much of the terror as he could, tried to channel the old Remus. The sad one, the one who lived for his friends and his friends alone. The one who was good at repressing, keeping his heart closed, his mind steady. The sole survivor, the one who could get by on his own. The one who had gotten lost somewhere along the way and hadn’t been missed. Seven whole months.

Remus almost cried from relief when he smelled it. Faint, but it was there, coming from the crack in the door in all its unfiltered glory. 

He fought with the blankets, stumbled and almost fell out of bed. He ran for the door, then forced himself to slow down. It had not been a dream, after all; he was still here.

Remus could see Sirius, standing in his dressing gown with small, slow snowflakes falling around him on their tiny little balcony. That door, too, had been left open a crack, and the smell of cigarette smoke was stronger, reaching out to embrace. Remus pushed the door open to brave the cold night air, knew he could brave anything at all now that he wasn’t alone.

“You’re awake,” Sirius stated redundantly. His voice was a bit hoarse and Remus felt some of the nervous, brittle things inside him shift. “I didn’t mean to wake you, sorry about that.”

If only he could find his footing Remus would explain to him that he couldn’t sleep alone anymore. That Sirius should have roused him, should bring him along on whatever night-time quests he went on. Remus would follow him out of bed, out the door, to the end of the worlds if required.

Then again, he didn’t want to sound needy.

“Fag?”

“Yes please.”

Remus’s voice was embarrassingly breathless, his fingers so fumbling that Sirius made no attempt to hand him the lighter, instead leaning in and lighting Remus’s cigarette for him. Sirius’s eyes burned, sharp and hot, and in a second it was gone, along with the lighter. Remus drew breath greedily, hoping that the nicotine might soothe him.

“I had a nightmare that I needed to get rid of, I didn’t think you’d notice if I stepped out for a few minutes.”

“You can always wake me,” said Remus. He wondered if it was presumptuous of him to assume that he could be of assistance, that he wasn’t just saying it because he couldn’t bear being alone in bed. Sirius’s nightmares were monsters of unknown calibres, and he was feeling a lot like a trapeze artist out of his depth, “Anytime. If you need to talk, or I could just listen, or… Do you suffer nightmares a lot?”

“I don’t,” said Sirius, hesitating, exhaling smoke out of his nostrils and mouth. “Almost never, nowadays, not since I left Grimmauld Place.” 

Remus thought he could see a familiar glimmer in his boyfriend’s eyes, maybe even a curve in the corner of his mouth. With the limited light it was difficult to tell. There was snow settling around their feet, melting on their bodies, staying frozen in their hair. London was quiet like it never normally was, as if the city was waiting for the snow to stop before it got back to it.

“That’s good,” Remus said stupidly, and now there was definitely a huff of laughter from the other. Still Remus couldn’t tell if it was the good kind or not. He could see snow in Sirius’s black hair, stuck in the elegant waves. “What was your dream about?”

“Oh, you know. Nightmares, fever dreams, memories of times past. The general sort of horror show that went on in Grimmauld Place.”

“You never told me the details, before,” Remus said carefully. The point was that he still didn’t know for sure. He suspected the worst but knew painfully little. He was Sirius’s boyfriend and he still didn’t know all there was to him.

Sirius was quiet for a long time. Long enough to stub out his cigarette, for them both to watch it fall down to the street below and add to the abundance of litter on the streets of Mile End. When he lit a new one Remus was already thinking that they had reached the end of the conversation. Sirius exhaled a new puff of smoke and it turned out they hadn’t.

“I dreamt that I was in my bedroom, sitting on the floor next to my bed,” Sirius said. “She – someone - had taken off my trousers and pants and put me in a bodybind curse. I wasn’t able to… There was a spell on my eyelids, although it didn’t work properly on both, just on the left. I wasn’t able to close it at all. I had to watch.”

Sirius smoked some more, and Remus felt as if he was being scrutinized. Weighed up. Remus tried to look sturdier than he felt, like he could take it. Something potent had Sirius in its grip, but Remus couldn’t tell if it was anger or sorrow or something equally troubling. Too dark to see his face properly, just the orange of the lit fag, the occasional dangerous glint of an eye. Sirius’s hands didn’t shake, but then they rarely did. 

Remus’s did. It was rather cold outside.

“They were fucking on my bed. Well, Bellatrix was, her man might have been in another bodybind, I couldn’t really tell from my viewpoint. She was having a riot of a time, anyway, on top and… She had a knife, this silver stiletto, Goblin made with encrusted emeralds on the handle, finest filigree, the works.”

Remus’s cigarette went out by burning his fingers, and he dropped it with an almost noiseless whimper. One less pinprick of orange light. Sirius’s eyes looked hollow now, darkness suffocating all around their balcony. The snow around his black hair looked like an eerie gloria.

“I was wearing a white stuffy dress shirt.”

“She killed him?” asked Remus.

“No, ‘course not. He was one of the thick-skulled Slytherins that signed up to be a Death Eater as soon as Voldemort came around collecting. She wouldn’t kill someone like that just for fun.”

Remus failed to find a good response. Sirius’s face was still in shadow.

“She laughed, of course, but he didn’t make any noise, which is why I think she hexed him before she… It was messy, but of course with her skill… I mean, mending a few cuts after you’re done would’ve been a piece of cake for someone like her.”

“How old...?”

Sirius spat on the floor of the balcony.

“I watched her get dressed, she always loved showing off. She showed me him, too, I watched how his skin knitted itself back together. He was fine. She left me there like that, they both went downstairs to join the rest of the godforsaken family for dinner. Mother found me in the end.”

“How old were you?”

Remus flinched, because Sirius stepped forward, suddenly, flicking his fag over his shoulder and getting unnervingly close. Remus felt his breath on his face, mint and tobacco, then a slow, trailing kiss along his cheek. Remus’s cheek was burning along the single frozen tear track that ran all the way down. 

“You’re freezing, let’s get you inside.” Sirius’s voice was heavy. They were both freezing, Remus thought. He let himself be led through the balcony door, watched Sirius pull it shut. His dressing gown hadn’t been properly closed and he was naked underneath, save for the thick, woollen socks on his feet that Remus recognized as his own. 

“The snow looks nice in your hair,” Sirius told him with forced cheer. “You’ll be a right silver fox when you’re older.”

“Did your mother comfort you when she found you?” Remus whispered. 

The unnatural cheer in Sirius’s face went out like the cigarette had. He pushed his hands into the pockets of the dressing gown.

“It was just a nightmare, Remus.”

Remus didn’t budge.

“My mother was never much of a hugger. I believe she dragged me by my dress shirt down the flights of stairs to the bathroom, screaming something about honour and blood. Some of Selwyn’s blood had gotten on my shirt, you see.”

Sirius swallowed audibly, but his eyes remained completely dry. 

“I was hauled into the bathtub. The body bind was losing its potency, but I wasn’t able to… Anyway, she conjured a big brush, one you might wash floors or rugs with. My skin was raw by the end of it, and the blood didn’t even wash out completely from the shirt, even though she used cold water and soap.”

Remus wasn’t sure when his hands had turned into fists, but by now his wiry wrists were shaking with how hard he was clenching them. He felt new tears veritably pour out of his eyes, leaving hot tracks along his face. Sirius had stopped looking at him while he spoke.

“Kreacher got the stain out, in the end,” Sirius continued absently. 

Remus forced his hands to open, to wipe away the worst of the wetness from his face. Then he closed the distance between them, which was three steps in physical terms, but felt like lightyears in every other way.

Sirius’s lips weren’t as warm as Remus was used to, and his dressing gown was still cold from outside. Remus pushed his hands inside of it, tried to make his hands feel comforting on Sirius’s waist. His lover didn’t flinch away, but he wasn’t opening up as normal, either. He tasted strongly of cigarettes, and Remus had to dig deep to find a flavour that was more palatable. 

He rubbed his hands up and down Sirius’s sides, like he was trying to bring something back. Trying to return feeling to him. Sirius stroked his face while they kissed, but it was tentative and unlike most anything that had previously passed between them. Sirius always knew how to touch him, had that something that told him how to make Remus feel good even when Remus didn’t know it himself. But these were new hands, hands he didn’t recognize at all. Touching Remus’s cheeks like the whole of him was an illusion, a trick of the light that might disappear at any moment.

Sirius began to speak, words muffled against Remus’s mouth. He heard the tremor in the voice, heard disjointed words here and there, but he only caught the entirety of the last sentence.

“I know you’d never hurt me,” Remus said decisively. “I’m not worried. You’re not like… There’s no risk you’ll do what she did; taking advantage and abusing and... She’s a sadist, and you’re…” Remus bit his lip, felt Sirius’s bottom one tremble just a little. Sirius’s eyes looked so unfathomably lost, so different from what Remus knew. “You might have the surname, but you don’t have it in you,” Remus finished. “You’re one of the good ones. You’re lovely. Always good to me, good in bed. I love you.”

Sirius finally smiled a little, warmth igniting in the metallic depths of his eyes. He kissed Remus again, and again. Held his jaw in his strong hands, tilted Remus’s face until they were both drowning in each other. Remus felt up his naked body underneath the dressing gown, grasped handfuls of pristine, velvety skin framing chiselled muscle that moved, that was hot and alive and eager for Remus’s touch.

He wasn’t aware of moving, but suddenly he was toppling over, landing on the sofa in the sitting room tangled in his lover. They squirmed against each other, maybe trying to get comfortable, maybe just needing more contact. 

Remus held his boyfriend and let himself be held. It felt impossible that something so vibrant and strong as his boyfriend could have come from something so abhorrent. Remus kissed his black hair, came away with wet lips that tasted like snow. He would have to tell him.

“My body likes you,” Remus said, noticing the inadequacy in the words as soon as they were out. “My body… All of…” Remus swallowed, searched himself for it. He had them right there, the most damning secrets he kept. The things about him nobody should know, the facts he pretended weren’t true. The things that would leave him vulnerable if he brought them out in the open.

“The wolf - the wolf wants to have babies that look just like you. That _are_ just like you.”

Sirius gave him a tender kiss.

“My body… My body doesn’t trust anyone. Didn’t use to, it gets anxious and hides. It’s not trusted me ever since… See, I couldn’t keep it safe, and it doesn’t trust me. Every month, it’s reminded that I… I can never get back what I lost. But I trust you, my body trust you. You make it feel good and safe, every day of every month. It lets you… You can have it. You have all of me.”

Remus felt a new tear slip down his cheek, felt an angry instinct to wipe it and to shy away. He let Sirius kiss it from his face instead.

“We’ll be alright together,” Sirius told him, and Remus found himself believing it. 

“We’ll be alright together.”

Sirius turned them around until Remus was lying on his back, until Sirius could lie down on top of him. His legs opened, instinctually he knew that Sirius was supposed to be there in between, filling up the cracks in his middle so that Remus didn’t fall apart. So that he didn’t give in to the worst of himself and tore his body apart. Sirius’s left hand went underneath his neck to support it, his right hand parked itself over Remus’s heart. It thumped just that little bit more eagerly, just to show that this was the reason it kept going. It kept working because Sirius needed to be able to feel it pump Remus’s blood around. 

Sirius was no good at giving chaste kisses. Remus’s mouth became full of his tongue and his moans and his heart beat wildly for his lover. He grew hot and aroused, tongued back, moaned back, and he thought that maybe he should have felt guilty for how his body reacted despite the night they had had. His body _liked_ Sirius though, that was the thing. It felt safe with him, in his hands and in his mouth. It didn’t care that Remus had just bared his heart for him, put himself in as precarious a position as he could for him. It didn’t care that Sirius had spent his childhood getting hurt, it still craved his touch, still craved sexual release from Sirius’s hand and Sirius’s hand alone. 

Remus rubbed his swollen erection against his lover, and it was merciful to find an answering hardness there, slipping out from Sirius’s dressing gown when it fell open. They were fucked up together, but they were also possessed by the same carnal need. Remus wondered if there would ever come a day when he would not get to spill the evidence of his profound sexual attraction into Sirius’s mouth. He hoped not.

Sirius was massaging his flat, skinny chest, rubbing deep circles into the meagre tissue. His nipple was getting caught up in it, though, and his nipple was ecstatic to contribute in any way it could. Remus suckled wetly on his lover’s tongue, grabbed his hips and helped make the grinding motion into targeted thrusts. His nipple was sparkling with electricity every time Sirius groped it, it helped send jolts of uncomplicated pleasure to Remus’s dick. His mind, which was where the complications lived, was filled with murky, shameful things, but Sirius was drawing them out one by one with his open, thorough, passionately erotic kisses. 

They both came over Remus’s pyjamas, Remus on the inside and Sirius on the outside. It might have been pathetic; it probably should have been embarrassing. Somehow it wasn’t, somehow every experience of Remus’s that was shared with Sirius turned out good. Somehow it felt satisfying, having his softening penis fondled when it was drenched in come and covered in soiled fabric. Sirius had nice hands.

Eventually Sirius sat up and Remus gazed up sleepily at him. The dressing gown was open and showing off Sirius’s beautiful, broad torso. Sirius stuck a hand in the pocket, digging out his wand. Remus watched him conjure up a flannel, watched him make it wet. His soaked pyjamas trousers were pulled off completely and he was laid bare in yet another way. Remus didn’t look, but he knew it was there. The ugly werewolf scar that had changed his life was on display on his hip.

Remus felt nothing but wretched love while Sirius brushed the wet flannel over his shrunken bits, cleaning up the evidence of what a gross animal he was. Sirius more commonly lapped up any semen Remus spilled, but there was something strangely erotic about this, strangely tender. Remus’s soft, pink, exhausted dick was caressed, Sirius’s hands were excruciatingly gentle when they petted it, when they removed the sticky smears from it. And his eyes… Remus’s breath caught; his whole ribcage stuttered when that registered. Sirius only had eyes for what could either have been the massive scar or the dirty, flaccid penis, eyes that looked to love and protect, all to the extent they temporarily lost everything to do with innate arrogance or sharp wit or long-lost innocence. He raised his eyes when Remus inhaled, watched his chest rise all the way and then moved on up to Remus’s eyes. They smiled for Remus, a warm, content, joyous smile.

“All clean now. Clean and sparkly and pretty. Need to get you some fresh pyjamas and then it’s back to bed.”

“And you’re coming as well?” Remus asked, grasping covetously for Sirius’s hand. Sirius laced their fingers together.

“I’ll be there. I might wrap around you like a needy puppy and smother you a bit.”

“I won’t mind,” Remus said.

Sirius grinned at him and hauled him into his arms, lifting him as he stood up and they left Remus’s discarded pyjama bottoms and the used flannel behind. When he carried Remus past the balcony door, they both noticed that the door was ajar. Sirius apparently hadn’t closed it properly.

It had snowed in, and the flakes had melted into a puddle.

“Hang on a sec,” Remus said, stopping Sirius who, with some difficulty, had gotten his wand out while still carrying Remus. “Can’t you see it?”

Sirius was quiet for a moment, looking at the puddle on the floor. It maybe required a bit of imagination, but to Remus the shape was clear.

“A heart,” Sirius stated eventually, sounding fond and placing a kiss in Remus’s untidy hair. Remus made a pleased noise and let Sirius vanish the puddle, close the balcony door properly, carry him to bed and dress him in clean new pyjamas.

They fell asleep in a mess of naked and clothed limbs, silky black hair bleeding into tawny crushed curls. Sirius held his hand over Remus’s pounding chest the whole night, and that’s how Remus woke up late in the morning, with his heart in safe hands.


End file.
